Tableau Dashboard Cookbook

Key Features

• Utilize the features of Tableau to create, design, and develop effective, beautiful dashboards
• Use data visualization principles to help you to design dashboards that enlighten and support business decisions
• Explore Tableau's functionality with practical lessons that help you to build your own solution as you progress through the book

Book Description

With increasing interest and enthusiasm for data visualization in the media, businesses are looking to create effective dashboards that engage as well as communicate the truth of data. Tableau makes data accessible to everyone, and is a great way of sharing enterprise dashboards across the business. The deceptively simple Tableau interface hides a variety and complexity of features available for dashboarding, and this book will help you to become familiar with these features.

Tableau offers an easy-to-use and fun way of designing, constructing, and sharing your dashboards. This book will familiarize you with its features and enable you to develop and enhance your dashboard skills, starting with an overview of what dashboard is followed by how you can collect data using various mathematical formulas. Next you'll learn to filter and group data, as well as how to use various functions to present the data in an appealing and accurate way. The book will also teach you how to use the key advanced string functions to play with data and images. You will be walked through the various features of Tableau including dual axes, scatterplot matrices, heat maps, and sizing. Finally, this book will help you consider what to do next with your dashboard, whether it's on a server or in collaboration with other tools.

What you will learn

• Customize your designs to meet the needs of your business using Tableau
• Use Tableau to prototype, develop, and deploy the final dashboard
• Communicate and share your dashboards internally within the business, or externally with the rest of the world via Tableau public
• Integrate your data to provide mashed-up dashboards
• Be inspired with color, motion, and other design tricks when designing dashboards
• Formulate your business rules into Tableau formulae that you can reuse
• Consider your business users and data consumer needs as you learn about color theory and psychology and put them into action

About the Author

Jen Stirrup is an award-winning and internationally recognized business intelligence and data visualization expert, author, data strategist, and technical community advocate. She has been honored repeatedly, along with receiving peer recognition, as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) in SQL Server. She is one of the top 100 most globally influential tweeters on big data topics. Jen has nearly 20 years of experience in delivering business intelligence and data visualization projects for companies of various sizes across the world.

Table of Contents

1. A Short Dash to Dashboarding!
2. Summarizing Your Data for Dashboards
3. Interacting with Data for Dashboards
4. Using Dashboards to Get Results
5. Putting the Dash into Dashboards
6. Making Dashboards Relevant
7. Visual Best Practices
8. Tell the World! Share Your Dashboards